


Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Time Travelers

by nicasio_silang



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2441558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This will not satisfy you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Time Travelers

1.

Ichabod steps too far into the road. The truck is going very fast, the fog is very thick. 

2.

Abbie shows up at the motel and says hello to Mike. It’s been quiet all night. She knocks, gets nothing. She calls out. Nothing. 

“I got an extra,” Mike says, and hands her the key. Abbie drops the bag of donut holes outside the door.

“Crane, we’re coming in,” she shouts ahead of herself. “Mr. Crane?”

The main room is clear. Bed empty, blankets mussed, her notes still hanging off the lamp and coffee maker. There’s water running somewhere. Abbie calls out again and Mike sticks his head in the bathroom.

“Lieutenant Mills?” he says. “In here.” 

The body’s all askew. Nude, soaked, dead only an hour or so. If there was blood to begin with, it’s since been washed away. Mike is saying he should have heard, he should have checked. 

“What was there to check,” Abbie says. She squats down onto her heels, both hands on the lip of the tub. “He must have slipped.”

Her labels for the cold and hot water taps are clogging the drain. Mike turns off the water, says he’s gonna call in, leaves Abbie in the bathroom with a lock of Crane’s hair between her fingers. She finds it hard to stand.

3.

Somewhat related to the previous: nobody thought to warn Ichabod against using electronics in the bath. 

4.

The whooping cough would have passed, but the measles comes close on its heels, and then something that might be tuberculosis, though it’s difficult to identify among the confluence of symptoms. 

The beds of his nails swell. The lining of his throat loosens and congeals. A rash rises on his skin, from his thighs to his gums. The cough won’t stop, the fever ratchets up higher and higher, he passes a hand across his mouth and it comes away red. 

Abbie takes him to the hospital, but it’s too much, too fast, too many people in the building breathing out too much filthy air. Already underweight, he withers. Spindle-thin, his fingers pluck at his sheets. Abbie takes his hand. She’s known him a week.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, stay with me, Crane. These doctors...they can work miracles these days. Stay with me.”

“I don’t,” he starts. Speaking brings up bile at the back of his tongue. “I don’t understand.”

The autopsy mentions typhoid. Or so she’s told-- the records are sealed. 

5.

Gerry Nicoletto, lately of Rochester, gets to do some work down east, down along the river, and if it turns out solid, then it might get to be a regular thing. It’s not that he wants to move outta town, but Joey’s turning 4, and Micki’s pregnant again, and she’s been talking all this shit about the schools in the city, spending all this time on the phone with her sister out in Chappaqua. They’re never gonna afford Chappaqua, but Newburgh maybe, or even something outside of Tarrytown if everything goes just right. Trips him up to think about a place big enough for four people, though. Micki wants each kid to have their own room. Gerry didn’t live in a room on his own until he was 22. They don’t argue about it or anything, but he looks at her like _what the fuck are you still doing here with me_ , and then he puts in more hours and he takes this contract down east with half of Friday off to sniff around the rental market.

The bitch of the thing is that he’d just this year started to get work on contracts downtown, downtown in Rochester, making some connections he thought he’d get to build on down the road. Ah, well, though. What are you gonna do.

Today it’s Wednesday and Gerry’s meeting with the surveying subcontractor at the site along Saw Mill River Parkway. It’s a spot that’s a little bit Tarrytown, a little bit Hawthorne, and a little bit Sleepy Hollow. Closest neighbors are a fire house and 2-year-old Comfort Inn that’s kicking in a discount for Gerry and his crew to stay there. They don’t do so well in competition with the riverside B&Bs they could use the sort of business this project would bring in. 

Gerry eases up the dirt drive that cuts across the site’s chain-link fence. Lobs a quick wave at the hardhat who pulls it open for him. Preston something, local boy. Gerry likes to know everyone’s names, but he’s used to Tonys, Joshes, Mikes. Preston? Christ’s sake.

The site isn’t quite cleared. Most of the trees are down, but there’s plenty of smaller scrub and larger rocks, shit waiting for the surveyors to finish their work before it’s torn out. An older guy in an orange sash comes out to meet him as Gerry swings down from his truck.

“You Gerry? Pat Duffin, we spoke on the phone.” Big handshake, dry hands.

“Sure did, good to put a face to the name. How’s it look out here today?”

Gerry would stand by his truck by habit, take a look around that way first, but Pat starts to amble deeper into the site, and it seems only right to follow. 

“Well, I talked to Bill Sutter, your equipment guy, earlier today. He’s ready to get moving when I call it good to go,” Pat says. He walks steady, talks slow. 

“And when do you think that’s gonna happen?” 

“Well,” Pat says again. He leads them into the brush, around some piled, mossy stones, up an incline that’s due to be leveled. “That’s gonna depend.”

“Excuse me?” Gerry looks over his shoulder, can’t remember if he locked his truck. “Hey, I want you to know that I’m all about taking the time to do things right. But you also gotta know I’m bleeding money every hour that I got people and equipment out here and not moving.” 

His boss was bleeding money, technically, but it’s Gerry’s ass regardless. 

“And I sympathize with that. ‘S why I brought you back here,” Pat says, and lifts up a thick fallen branch to reveal a stone staircase disappearing into the hard-packed earth.

Gerry likes working in the city. He runs into zoning shit, and fucked up chains of ownership, and building codes, fire codes, all of that so often that it’s second nature to make sure he knows where he stands. Whose palms you gotta press a buck into, and when it’s not worth the trouble to avoid just doing it by the book. He’s got a cousin in City Hall, he’s got a ragged book full of phone numbers, he can expedite in the city. He takes a breath of crisp eastern air.

“That looks old,” Gerry says.

“Sure does,” says Pat.

“You been down there?” 

“Just for a minute. Didn’t have a flashlight on me.”

Gerry asks, finally, “You call it in yet?”

Pat drops the branch back over the opening. It’s nothing now, just a dark spot and a hazard. 

“I did not,” he says. “I thought I’d wait on you.”

Gerry walks them half a dozen paces away, he doesn’t want to stand around it, doesn’t want someone coming up. “Goddamn it,” he says. Pat takes a seat on a log.

“Son, I have been working in this part of the state for more than 40 years. I can tell you how this is gonna go, if you want me to.” Gerry doesn’t want him to. “Or I can tell you that I’ve been working here for more than 40 years, and to be perfectly honest I’m not paid enough to care about whatever the hell that is.”

Gerry laughs. “Who the hell gets paid enough for that?”

“Nobody who’d have to deal with it.”

Gerry says, “We’re more than $10k sunk into this site already.” He lowballs it for his own benefit. He chose the location personally. 

Down on the Parkway traffic is picking up with the morning rush. Away where nothing’s been cleared, birds are bleating to the sun. He’s gotta call Micki soon to tell her good morning. 

“Shit,” Gerry says. “What do you think it is?”

“Native American, maybe.” Pat shrugs. “Civil War, maybe.” 

“Yeah. Yeah, maybe.” Gerry’s got a 10 o’clock down the road, he’s got a phone call with the boss at lunch. He starts walking back to his truck. “I got some discretionary in my glove box. Let’s sign it off and get moving.”

Four years later, Ichabod Crane wakes up fifteen feet below an Old Navy outlet store. There’s very little air. It only takes a few minutes.

**Author's Note:**

> I get so much pleasure out of murdering Ichabod in every possible way. I will maybe add other Ichabod-killings to this down the road sometime. Sorry, buddy.


End file.
